You did not mention any status for the mirror server. Is it safe to conclude you aren't paying for the mirror service?

At it's most basic level that message indicates a problem accessing/logging in to eBay. It's a rare 1 in 1,000-ish error now for a non mirrored bid. I do not believe anyone paying for the mirror service has reported a snipe fail at all for a timeout error now that gixen is "linked" directly to eBay.

Beyond that - the "why" it happened - might be at a deeper level that Mario could look at in the logs. Like if eBay sent out a request for you to confirm some of your account information as part of the bid attempt - which is something gixen cannot do for you.

No, I'm not a subscriber - I didn't think it was necessary to subscribe to avoid missing snipes due to technical problems at Gixen's end. I didn't get anything at all from eBay, just that email from Gixen, the "end auction" email mentioning the error after it was too late for me to do anything.

Rickajho wrote:

You did not mention any status for the mirror server. Is it safe to conclude you aren't paying for the mirror service?

At it's most basic level that message indicates a problem accessing/logging in to eBay. It's a rare 1 in 1,000-ish error now for a non mirrored bid. I do not believe anyone paying for the mirror service has reported a snipe fail at all for a timeout error now that gixen is "linked" directly to eBay.

Beyond that - the "why" it happened - might be at a deeper level that Mario could look at in the logs. Like if eBay sent out a request for you to confirm some of your account information as part of the bid attempt - which is something gixen cannot do for you.

There are various reasons this error could occur. Often, it is a problem that occurred on eBay's end. As Rickajho pointed out, a mirror subscription acts as insurance against missing a snipe because of this when the problem is at Gixen's end. For more, see the threads here and here._________________John

If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
--- Yogi Berra

Last edited by juangrande on Mon Jan 15, 2018 12:01 pm; edited 1 time in total

In this case is doesn't appear to be a technical problem on the gixen end of things. The service did, after all, attempt to execute the snipe. But the interwebs is far from perfect (let me tell you how much fun ComCast is in my area...) especially for a timing critical thing like sniping. The mirror service hugely improves your odds of beating any technical internet glitches by placing the bid from two different servers at two different physical locations. What then matters is that one of the two servers gets there first.

So, what happened exactly? All I'm getting is "It wasn't us!" and trying to pass the buck to eBay. I'm not sure of the purpose of subscribing if you're not sure what went wrong when things do go wrong.

No one is passing the buck to anyone - you see, I don't have a 3 feet cable between Gixen servers and eBay. There is typically 10-15 nodes between Gixen servers and eBay, and problem may have happened on any one of them.

In addition, note that it is by design of the TCP protocol that congestion is detected by packet loss. So it's normal to sometimes experience timeouts. When I say "sometimes" this is still relatively rare - but you can, on average, expect 1 in 500 requests to time out.

Gixen Mirror is a way for Gixen to generate income, sure, but it also serves a real purpose - an additional server sending bids from a different location practically eliminates a chance of failure.

To put what Mario explained in mathematical terms, with a mirror subscription sending your snipes from two independent and geographically distant servers, the chance of failure would be about 1 in (500)^2; that is, about 1 in 250,000. So, Mario is justified in claiming that a mirror subscription effectively eliminates the chance of failure._________________John

If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
--- Yogi Berra

OK, so as Mario stated, further up his thread you should expect perhaps 1 in 500 snipes from a single server to end that way, if you find with the free service that you are getting more than that it might be related to your account in some way, perhaps a bidding restriction placed by Ebay._________________Mark